(The gorgeous details: supersize horizon-greedy blue eyes, a pinkie of perfume behind her mouse ears, lips pursed together, taking in air and time, almond-toned skin, ski-slope nose, curves along the cheekbones and a brutal bomb of hair hidden in soft light-brown piles under a tartly red felt beret. Our first few encounters, in which I fumbled my way into an after-work drink, I’d felt anxious, like I was being tipped over on a carnival ride. I said something weird, like she was the caramel apple of her father’s eye, which led to absolutely no reaction on her part; denying comprehension, sympathy, presence. A few weeks later, we worked a conference together for two days straight, which led to a showdown of misguided proportions: her staying over one night, watching old VHS movies and taking a shower at three a.m. to cool off.)
The second message was softer, quieter, and at first, didn’t even sound like her at all. She described her wrecked evening: "I guess you are out [pause, exhale]. I was in a car accident tonight. I spun out and hit the guardrail, smashed my side of the hood and door. I was so scared of what it would feel like to come up against the rail and how close I came to flipping over it and drowning in the lake. It happened so fast. Now I’m in bed and I just want to curl up into you and never feel scared again. I want you to draw me up into your arms and call me a warm bagel and stroke back my salty tears. Goodnight, sweet prince of darkness."
"She sounds sincere. A bit weird, but when was this?"
"Three days ago."
"I’m starving. Where’s Mom?"
"Oh, I was reading on PHYSURG.COM, and they have this article about scarred women and men and how hot they are. Like girls would only want me for a short-term deal. It says, though, that men don’t care; they’ll keep a girl forever if she’s scarred. So there you go, Hol."
The waitress sauntered up, black apron with burger-bun dust on it.
"Can I get you guys something to drink to start?"
"We’re waiting for someone," Holly said. "Our mother, actually."
"Oh, that’s nice," the waitress said.
"We’re hoping for the best," I said. "In the meantime, I’ll have a ginger ale."
"I’ll have a tea, please," Holly said.
"Sure," the waitress smiled, pausing before her departure.
*
When Mom arrived, she had windy tears in her eyes. She was decked out in a hefty beige winter coat, and her walk resembled that of a near-blind sports-team mascot.
"I wasn’t sure which place it was," she said, sitting down beside me.
As a waft of burger fume came forth in a cloud of sweat, I recalled Mom’s infamous Sisyphean patty-slapping ordeal in Technicolor, and Dad’s insanity joke.
"I got Growing Pains on DVD. I liked Mike, D-student, always trying to cover up broken lamps with glue and parental distractions."
"You never tried hiding your destruction," Mom interjected, as another cloud of food smell floated by, all tender and toying. "Remember the time you threw fabric softener all over the basement walls?"
I didn’t play the "remember" game back: remember the porch coffee, tossed as I passed by on my bike, like I was a rodent you were trying to fumigate with caffeine.
It was a pure war; part of me was summoned from hell to battle through. Those were the clothes I wore, the weapons I used.
"So how is Sadie?" I asked. "Still in school?"
"What do you think is in the burgers?" Holly said. "She’s like a leading monster in a horror-film franchise," Holly said. "She can’t be killed."
"She’s twenty next week," Mom said shuffling within her large beige winter jacket, which now sported a fresh glob of mayonnaise, with just a hint of it on her cheek. I watched the coat glob glisten as I passed her a napkin. "We could sell tickets to see Toronto’s only two-hundred-year-old cat," Holly suggested.
"Yes, Pay-per-view funerals are getting expensive."
"Anyway," Mom said, her face glazed now in a near-frown, "How’s work?"
"Still working for that media company, writing stuff for their site," I said, adding, "Cut and paste and JPEG shuffling."
"What media?"
"That’s classified."
"It’s wresting, Mom," Holly said, her voice a shorter fuse now, anxious, insistent as if partially defensive, suggesting not to doubt me.
"Oh," she said. "Do they pay you?"
"Yes, just me; everyone else works for free. Including my boss."
"Oh, stop it," Mom said. "So what do I feel like eating for lunch?"
Holly turned to me; I saw her eyes get all bright and direct. "Hey, do you have a blog?"
"Why?"
"I Googled you and it came up."
"No. I mean, I don’t know how to delete it," I said. "Shall we rent a movie?"
The winter sun was relentless now. Mom adapted with a pair of amber-tinted sunglasses. She was wearing a mauve blouse and a bank-robber neckerchief.
"I still remember the time you made us watch Cape Fear for that first Christmas without Grammy."
"I didn’t make Cape Fear, Mom. There were other rooms in the house too. You didn’t have to watch it."
Holly shook her hand in front of me. "The blog? What’s it called?"
"Shapes and gardens are fun," I responded.
"No, seriously, what was it again?"
<< TheGlenvaleWarDidNotTakePlace.blogspot.com >>
"I fell five times last year," Mom said. "Just got to be careful."
The statement billowed into a daydream: a sensational sports-stat graphic, suitable for the back of a baseball card. Diane, 66, fell 5 times in 2008. 2 head colds. 3 migraines. 4 cavities.
"I was rushing for a bus one time; the other time I fell off the bus, getting out at my stop at Mount Pleasant."
Neither Holly nor I had ever witnessed these falls, but Mom’s partial recreation on a loop busied us in delirious late-night bonding sessions. Mom’s sporadic tumbles made her more human. We wanted to know why she was falling.
The burgers and fries were consumed in under an hour, but the caravan of family excess spilled into late afternoon.
Holly had mentioned to me that Sadie was sick and she was thinking of taking our antique cat from Mom for a while. Sadie was known for her low-mirth disposition since her arrival in mid-1989, replacing Benji, who had died four years earlier, having arrived a year before Holly was even born and three before me.
"Knee deep in banana bread, as usual," I said, bringing a box of books from the hall closet into the living room.
Holly was washing a cup for a drink of water.
"Mom, why do you put Sadie’s food in the kitchen sink? It stinks. My God, open the window," Holly said, her face clenched.
"It’s cat food; it’s supposed to smell that way. Jesus," Mom replied.
"Real cat," I said.
"Yeah," Holly said. "She’s all cat."
Mom told us about work: Slocombe & Michaels, an investment firm where she worked part-time, had started trimming the fat.
"They’re laying people off left, right and centre," she said, holding the fold-out instructions over the cadaver of wood I held in my hands. Holly cut up an apple.
Mom was watching a car park in the driveway across the street while a small pot of tomato soup bubbled over the right rear element. Our lives were not at all comparable, each of us on Earth unique and special, as special and unique as the next set of circumstances, DNA and pulse. We, the amoebas from the memory pond, go belly-up from time to time.
"Michelle is fighting to keep me on board, but I just have this awful feeling."
Holly was standing beside three boxes of books.
"So we can put some of these away?"
"Sure."
"Then we’ll put the bookcase in the spare room. That’s the plan right?" Holly said, now taking charge of all things.
"Yes," Mom replied, now aware she was chewing on her fingernails. I toiled with screws and tacks, looking at the peg holes along the planks carefully. Sadie sauntered into the room where the construction was taking place.
"Your father has been secure for years off his investments from the house, you know. I don’t have any rich relatives who can leave me anything."
"That’s true; you don’t," I said.
Mom’s economic weakness was news to me, as I had, up to this point, believed Mom was a mythological pioneer of survival. She had somehow managed to cultivate an ongoing existence: partial excess, part restraint, in order to facilitate life for herself and Sadie.
"So, we’ll see," Mom said, disappearing down the hallway.
Sadie was like a main organ in Mom’s world, an occasional vocal signal post that measured her own mortal coil. She curled up on the empty cardboard box the bookshelf came in. "And Sadie is sick. The doctor doesn’t know exactly what’s wrong with her."
I looked at Sadie, pawing at the empty plastic bags the screws came in, regressing into kitten-like behaviour a decade and half too late. From the kitchen mom’s stereo blared classical music.
"It’s like an institute in here," Holly sniggered.
"Be careful, Nate," Mom said, hands on her hips, a piece of muffin shrapnel lodged in her mouth. She studied her new bookshelves.
"So I’ve been talking with Susan," Mom said, twisting a plastic bag of freshly baked muffins with a big knot and swollen air inside, "and she thinks it’s a great idea to move down for a bit."
Susan was another Kodak apparition, late-1970s, my only recollection being a photograph of three blonde kids on our couch on Mann Avenue, some in pirate newspaper hats, and one, Tracy, too cool for their childish leanings, sat bored, her pirate hat beside her, never worn.
By the time the first row of hardcover mystery novels made their way onto the bookshelf, Mom had unfurled a massive get-away plan, a relocation program that would, as she put it, "solve all of my problems, you know?"
"It’s far away, Mom."
"It’s my safety net, I guess, for now. I can rent this place out."
"And you’d live with Susan?"
"She works at one of the local colleges, says she might be able to make some calls for me, get me a job on campus," Mom said.
"Why do you have all these football clippings, Mom?" Holly asked.
"Just a scrapbook I’m making for my class."
"Sports class?"
"No, it’s a general interest course on broadcasting, different kinds, you know?
The phone rang. It was Dad. "Nate’s here, yes, he sent you his things for taxes. Well, you’ll probably get it tomorrow. I have to go."
She returned to the small table where we were drinking tea, talking, shuffling and sniffing. "Your father is in his usual mood," Mom said.
"Taxes are sometimes late. Big deal," I said.
"I know what you mean; I think that your father is just impatient sometimes."
Her walk, now a physical stutter, was combined with an irritated cough, a trickle of arthritic pain, and the slow sashay of her silver-haired Vader-helmet-shaped bob with each step as she observed my IKEA trance.
"So you have a passport?" I asked, "deportation forms?"
"Yes."
"Why do you have twenty coats? You can get rid of some. Keep two, and we’ll take this to Goodwill," Holly suggested.
"That’s my decision."
"And these books, you can’t ship a thousand books to Dallas."
"I can’t think about that now," Mom said.
"Better to get rid of the stuff now," Holly said, trying to be both sensitive and diplomatic.
"I don’t know!"
"OK, you decide. I’ll go and get some more garbage bags."
I shuffled some papers. "These continuing education courses sound like astronaut school."
"I’m halfway through my course on famous trials."
The pantry was full of ants. "It’s ’cause you carbo-load," I said. "It’s in the Bible, they just—"
Mom interrupted, "OK, just help me move the things out of there so I can clean up a bit."
In the storage room, I found Holly. "Remember these?"
"Not really. The ’90s are a blur for me, thankfully," I said.
Holly put The Doors T-shirts back into the garbage bag. "We have a lot of crap in here," Holly said. "What’s this? A Cape Fear colouring book?"
"I wish," I said. "Are you hungry?"
"A bit. But I don’t want to eat here," Holly said, dragging a garbage bag towards the exit.
*
Now recovering from the bookcase ordeal, I collapsed down on the beige-striped sofa, with all its foreignness.
Enter Mom.
"How you doing?"
"I feel fine and I feel good," I said. "Feeling like I never should."
Occasionally, when there was nowhere else to go, to be, I’d find myself washed up on the shores of this small co-op apartment Mom owned for an awkward meal or tea over harsh lighting, and she would update me on the state of the community, blasé names dropped as if she were reading off a predictable list, a grocery store extra, a former babysitter or area hood, the boy who broke into Northlea United church to vandalize it is now a radio host in Oshawa, things like that. The throwaway characters from those stretches of years who rode their bikes, who screamed obscenities, who appeared on swings with girls and then disappeared, who were early smart bombs of divorce, relocated into an anecdotal trough.
"What’s this?" Holly asked, holding an old black-and-white photo up.
Mom squinted. "That’s our basement on Elmer Avenue, just after we moved in. The army offered to pay for a down payment on a house, and the navy gave Uncle Carl his college education as a pharmacist. That was the deal I think the government made when you got out of the war. Mom and Dad bought the house at 46 Elmer Ave. I don’t know the year they moved in, but I do remember starting kindergarten at Kew Beach Public School, which was at the bottom of the street. That’s why I always liked taking you guys to the Beaches when you were younger, because I grew up there," Mom said, opening a recycled plastic bottle full of tap water—dribbling some down her chin.
"And now you’re moving to the desert."
"I’ve known Sue my whole life; it seems surreal. She got me my first job at the CBC, because Grampy wanted me to work for the government when Sue and I finished Weller Business College, so I did for about six months then decided to join Sue and got a job in the TV Drama Department, which was located up above a restaurant at Gerard and Yonge. Sue was in the Radio Department nearby, and I worked in the Children’s Department for about three years as the secretary to the supervising producer.
"And you met Mr. Dressup and Mr. Rogers?"
"Not Mr. Rogers, which was an American production, but yes, Mr. Dressup and the Friendly Giant."
"And that’s when you met Dad?"
"No. I got my job at the University of Toronto in September after I came back from Ottawa and I met your Dad around the beginning of October 1969, and we were married in September the next year."
"And that’s when you had Benji, our first cat, and he got trapped on the ledge?"
"He was just a kitten...your dad, you know that picture of him inside of your dad’s coat, right?"
"Yeah," Holly said. "I love that picture."
"Oh yes, it was terrifying for me because the windows would blow open and sometimes close, and one time he was out on the ledge and it blew closed and he was pawing at the window, and I had to get him to move away from the part of the glass that I was trying to open, or he’d get pushed right off, so I had to trick him and get him to walk the other way by shaking his Yummies so he would want to come in, and he walked back across the window ledge, and then I was able to open the window, and once he’d pass, was able to close it and then open it again."
"Benji was way cooler than Sadie."
"I remember when we were going to the cottage
we hit a whiteout on the 400. Your dad had to drive really slowly, hoping to be able to see the red tail lights of the car in front of us, and Benji sat right up on the dashboard so he could see where we were going—fascinated, I guess, by all the snow. He was never upset about going in the car because I guess he knew he was going on holiday with us."
"When we actually went on holidays," Holly said, flipping through photographs.
"Why did we go to a cottage in a blizzard?" I asked.
"Because it was available, and cheaper I guess."
"Seems insane," I said, adding, "like The Shining."
"There are tons of photos, Mom," Holly said, plowing through the Kodak tomb.
"He always wanted to be with us. He loved us. He used to sleep with you when you were sick."
"There’s a bunch of photos," Holly said, handing me a glossy stack. "They’re mostly of you dressed like Han Solo and Jacques Plante, holding the wooden trophies you made and awarded yourself."
"I earned every one of those trophies."
"Then Dad threw them in the fireplace."
"Sounds like a wicked commercial for self-esteem," I said, taking a few seconds to relish in the deleted scene of Dad taking the time to remove my name plate (a plastic Coke-bottle cap liner) from each piece of wood before throwing it into the flames.
"I remember when I saw your trophies in a stack of wood by the fireplace," Holly laughed. "It was funny."
"Do you want to keep this sweater?" Mom asked Holly.
"No, that’s OK. It’s too seasick green for me."
"Didn’t I get it for you?"
"I don’t think so."
"I think I got it for you for Christmas one year."
"You aren’t the only arbiter of clothing, Mom," Holly said. "Want some pizza, Mom?"
"Where would we order it from?" Mom asked, walking out of the boxy living room to the tiny hallway connecting the rest of her apartment.
I clamped my hand over my face and ran it slowly down to my neck. "I’m going to make some tea."
Holly scoured through a selection of hulking video cassettes. She lifted up one colourful VHS case, her eyes now bright and alive.
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